SVGs and XML
As well as its use on websites, SVG has made its way into common usage in XML standards commonly used for technical documentation, such as DITA and DocBook. It’s easy to see why. These XML grammars include other XML-based standards such as MathML, CALS tables and SVG within them. It’s an easy way to bring additional features to a standard without having to reinvent the wheel and means that we can process these additional features with standard tools. Even when documents are published to PDF rather than the web, it still makes sense to make use of SVG images to bring maximum flexibility in the final publication.
Spot the difference
In the past we’ve used SVG images to bring a bit of fun to our trade show stands with a spot the difference competition. Seeing visitors to our booth scratching their heads as they stare at two images side-by-side, trying to find the differences always brings a smile to our faces. But of course the main point of these competitions is to show how much easier it is to find the differences with our software.
Van Gogh’s The Bedroom
Back in 2018, we ran this competition using an SVG version of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. In that case, 85% of people failed to find all the differences between the two images, even though there were just nine of them. Back then, using version 9 of XML Compare, we could find all the changes, but we had to write a custom pipeline using XSLT to highlight the changes using animation.